Printer-friendly

Contact Author

August 6, 2009

Checking the Numbers

Stunted Development

by Eric Seidman

As the trading deadline drew to a close last Friday, the world learned of a few failed blockbuster deals, one of which would have supposedly sent Adrian Gonzalez and Heath Bell to Mannywood in exchange for James Loney, Russell Martin, and Blake DeWitt, among others. Whether or not the trade ever had any traction remains up in the air, but my initial reaction included a hint of hesitancy for the Dodgers to part ways with Loney. Granted, I catch a Vin Scully-announced game on the baseball package every now and then as the hours pass by at night, but my knowledge of Loney had been reliant upon his reputation as opposed to the underlying data. The opinions of several sources as well as my own amateur scouting painted a picture of a player with a sweet swing, one sure to produce gap power, a great eye at the dish, sound instincts and slick glovework, a confluence of characteristics capable of creating an All-Star talent. After trekking to his stats page, though, I sat in disbelief, jaw agape in an exaggerated fashion over the extents to which his performance has fallen off.

After posting EqA marks north of .290 in both his age-22 and age-23 seasons, Loney dropped to a modest .271 last season, and he currently seems to be on pace for another season in that general vicinity. While his production this past year and a half is nothing to necessarily spit on, Marc Normandin recently noted that the league-average first baseman has produced an EqA of around .283 in 2007-08 and has improved to around .290 through the first few months of the current campaign. Add in that Loney’s defensive statistics have not yet matched his reputation for excellence, falling somewhere in the slightly below average range, and it seems as though this current version of himself approximates the replacement level for the position. Things aren’t entirely sour on the Loney front—he makes contact and reaches base at decent enough clips, but he just does not hit for nearly enough power to justify any sort of hesitancy when a deal involving Adrian Gonzalez comes to mind. In fact, his precipitous power decline from slugging .559 to .538 to .434 to .404 has invited ample amounts of speculation as to whether or not he will ever develop and sustain enough pop to merit full-time, non-platoon duty as a first baseman.

For starters, his devolution, if you will, can be aptly summed by a blurb in the 2005 edition of the Baseball Prospectus annual, if we make a minor substitution, replacing the word 'prospect' with 'productive everyday first baseman':

Well, at least he's still young, and serves as a nice cautionary tale regarding Cory Dunlap. Loney had a very nice season in the Pioneer League right out of high school, and has pretty much been in a tailspin since. He was largely uncomfortable, even overmatched, by the pitching in the Southern League. He's young enough so that he can take a couple shots at a given league, perhaps twice, and still have a very nice career. But we've now got 170 AB that say he's something of a prospect, and about 800 that say he's not. The Dodgers hope Loney's struggles are the result of the broken wrist and broken finger he's suffered the last couple years, but he'll have to prove himself either way.

Loney essentially has a small sample in which he looks quite capable of progressing into a force to be reckoned with, and a larger, contradictory sample in which his upside looks akin to the expected performance of someone like Adam LaRoche. While emulating LaRoche is not awful in and of itself, little leaguers do not necessarily pray at night in the hopes to someday become the next Adam LaRoche. Moving forward, blurbs in the annual continued to attribute his sapped power in the minors to hand and wrist injuries, expecting that his keen eye and discipline at the plate would remain intact nevertheless, potentially yielding a greater power output as the natural maturation process occurred.

His 2006 season consisted of a few separate trips to the big leagues, resulting in an overall line of .284/.342/.559 that was not consistently on display. From April 4-21, Loney hit a measly .225/.295/.300 in 44 PA, a small sample of course, but enough to keep him off of the roster once injuries to others healed. His second stint, running from July 29-August 16, featured a .313/.389/.625 line in 36 PA, though he was still yet to go deep in a major league game. Recalled once more on September 2 and with the big league club until the end of the season, Loney would hit .333/.355/.833 with four home runs in 31 PA, the type of production that worked in conjunction to his prior call-up to distinctly impress those with decision-making powers, regardless of the small sample in which the data was accrued.